I mentioned I would post the results of my sleep study the other day too, and I never did do that.

So here’s what the doc said on the sleep study:

I have mild to moderate sleep apnea, with about 30 apnea episodes over an almost eight hour sleep period. However, I had nearly 80 hypopnea episodes over that same period, meaning about 50 of the hypoxic times had nothing to do with obstruction or apnea, but rather, with an underlying pulmonary condition that should be ‘correlated clinically’.

Around 10pm, about an hour into my sleep cycle, I dropped sats to 85 and stayed there for five minutes. The protocol is to start oxygen if that happens, so he started me on one liter per minute, but it only came up to 86, then moved me to 2 liters per minute, and even then, I spent over 90% of the night with my sats below 90%. Remember, now, anything below 92% can cause organ failure or damage.

So yes, I have a sleep disorder, based on a pulmonary condition, but we don’t know what that is yet… or at least, they didn’t. We kinda do.

The pulmonologist was convinced the pulmonary hypertension was being caused by a sleep disorder, and he was hopeful that if I had apnea or some other disorder of sleeping, then they would treat that and my PAH would correct itself, and once it corrected itself, the congestive heart failure would go away.

The bad news is: now, the doc’s are confused, because obviously, the hypoxea is causing the sleep disorder and not the other way around.

What that means is, instead of thinking this was PAH and it would go away by using a CPAP or treating the sleep disorder, and the PAH was secondary to that disorder, it appears the PAH is primary. That means that even if we treat the sleep disorder, I’m probably still going to have PAH.

And that is a very depressing thought when I had been assured a year from now I’d probably be back to feeling more like myself again.

Instead, I now have a chronic, progressive, debilitating and often deadly disease.